October 18, 2006

Perhaps more importantly, I'm just getting tired of the punditry style of blogging. I'm not enjoying writing that style as much; for that matter, I'm not enjoying reading other punditry blogs very much these days.

I can understand Steve's decision. General interest blogging is hard work. Conglomerate has become more tightly focused on business and law over time, partly because we have expanded the number of bloggers and our common interest is business law. But I suspect that another explanation for this development is that those of us who blog here find that blogging about work is easier than blogging about all manner of other subjects.

I wonder how much of it is a response to the general malaise that is settling over politics these days and how much has something to do with blogging burnout and the intermixture between academics and blogging and how such a person wishes to present themselves to the general public....

Of course, I disagree, guys. But there are different paths in blogging as in life. You go your way and I'll go mine.

ADDED: There's a matter of perspective here. Should you ask how can I have less work or how can I have more fun? If you'd approached your blogging as a pleasure all along, having more of it would seem good.

IN THE EMAIL: Stephen Bainbridge objects to that last sentence (about pleasure):

So you never burnt out on a hobby? Pardon me for expressing it in economic terms, but the basic point was that blogging in a partcular style had stopped being rewarding. I don't know why that would invite snark.

MORE: I should add that my post is not offhanded snark. It's a longstanding theme here and is, if fact, what I wrote my paper about for the Bloggership conference last spring. The theme of most of the other papers was that lawprof bloggers should find ways to make blogging more ostensibly like legal scholarship, and I passionately took the contrary position.

Ann, you have general interest blogging down, and I salute you for it. You go your way and I'll go mine? Talk about something that's easy for you to say!

But, I think Bainbridge is making a mistake. I certainly won't read him now. I'm a litigator, not a business lawyer. Besides, how boring would it be just to read (or write) about one thing all the time?

As the old line goes, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

A blog is a billboard, a platform upon which one can further one's career. If you're blogging and you're not generating decent ad revenues, getting good clangs in the tip jar, winning a book deal, or otherwise enhancing your existing day-job, it's unclear what the purpose is.

And then there are those lower down on the food chain...the people who apparently content themselves with commenting on other people's blogs. What are we to make of them? Are they remoras? Little birds who clean the teeth of rhinoceroses? Or worse...mere gnats?

"A blog is a billboard, a platform upon which one can further one's career. If you're blogging and you're not generating decent ad revenues, getting good clangs in the tip jar, winning a book deal, or otherwise enhancing your existing day-job, it's unclear what the purpose is."---george

What's the purpose of yammering on the telephone? What's the purpose of stopping and making small talk on the street?

You show me the most purposeful, goal-oriented individual...

...and I'll show you someone who engages in dozens of aimless, superflous, obsolete activities, endlessly throughout their day.

For what it was worth, I was musing about a) why I thought Steve might be inclined to change his blogstyle (is that a word?), and b) the fact that while my blogging energies have not run dry (and yes, it is a pleasure) I do find myself tired of shrill partisanship (which the linked post talks about).

I do think while initially (now over three years) blogging made me inclined to be more partisan than I tended to be in other situations, the more I have blogged the less partisan I have become--although as I noted in my post, that doesn't mean my philosophical perspectives have been diluted. Rather, I find that the more I comment on daily politics, the more obvious it is to me that the parties (especially the party I normally support) does not conform as well to my ideals as I once hoped that it would. And as a result I find myself growing impatient with those who are blindly partisan (*cough* Hugh Hewitt *cough*).

Let's just day that I am not planning to retreat into blogging solely about Latin American politics (which is my main academic specialty). I prefer to remain a generalist in my blogging and to hopefully be seen as a reasonable commentator on our politic world.

Ann, Steve is weary of "the punditry style of blogging," but I don't have strong opinions on that, since I avoid most of those blogs anyway. (Althouse excepted!) My point was merely that general interest blogging was harder for me than specialized blogging.

Ann: "If you'd approached your blogging as a pleasure all along, having more of it would seem good."

This may be hard to believe, but I love corporate law, so blogging about it is fun!

I have a feeling this blog-ennui has a lot to do with the current political situation. Elections used to be called "Silly Season." Now they're "Icky Season." Bloggers who were thrilled to write about Donald Rumsfeld three years ago now are forced to deal with left-wing gay gay-baiters and it's ... bleah.

(But they are open to comments, and seem to learn from others and revise opinions. So higher marks than the average corporate mindset there.)

I suspect a lot of bloggers like to talk politics, strategy and Republicanism when times are good, but know enough to keep quiet and focus elsewhere when their theories and education prove un-useful. Nothing wrong with that. I suspect when things get a bit safer, they'll be venturing opinions and congratulations once again.

Good point! The beauty is in the journey! As far as the blogs are concerned, they remind me of the street preacher on the corner and the townsquare in days when there was only print media to take exception to!

It's interesting that Bainbridge's idea about lawprof blogging is reverting, at least ostensibly, to a more typical academic arc -- narrowing and specializing, writing for a smaller, presumably better informed and like-minded audience about a very specific range of topics. On that view, lawprof blogging replicates in an informal setting the same sort of discussion that happens at academic conferences, and in its informality suggests more of the quick conversation among colleagues in the hallway than the more formal presentations in the conference room. I say "ostensibly" here because I doubt that Bainbridge (whom I've read off and of for a long time) intends to give up his blogging about wine. In time, I think that will lead him back, at least occasionally, to broader topics of more general interest.

The "eclectic, general interest blog" is in the tradition of the public intellectual of yore, but made informal by the need to write daily to keep it going. In its informality as well as its occasional flashes of brilliance, it reminds me of Dr. Johnson's dinner conversation. I think that this is also what the Partisan Review crowd would have done, while also keeping up their more formal writing in the Review, if the technology had existed back then. Eminent literary critics once regarded the role of "general interest" public intellectual as part of their job description (e.g., Lionel Trilling). Today, with the exception of a very few (Harold Bloom and Stanley Fish come to mind), academic literary critics don't do much of that anymore. The main book review (NYT, NYRB, TLS) do some of it, but there main focus is elsewhere. And the op-ed pages have pretty much become a predicable partisan wasteland.

So, there is both room and demand for informed but informal commentary by tenured faculty in that tradition, addressing topics of general interest. Bainbridge's exhaustion with the burdens of that role is perhaps understandable. But it also reflects an unfortunate, self-imposed narrowness of vocation -- who are better placed, by training and otherwise, than tenured faculty at major research universities don't take up that challenge? A professor could do a lot worse than keeping alive the "eclectic, general interest" conversations that Dr. Johnson and Lionel Trilling, among many other practitioners, once fostered. And Steve Taylor's comment in this chain suggests an added bonus -- perhaps not surprisingly, by staying engaged in the conversation, one learns quite a bit about one's own views, which sharpen and grow in depth by doing so.